Missouri Compromise
Stephen J. Pyne. 2007. Missouri Compromise. Copyright 2007 Stephen J. Pyne.
Full text [here]
Review with selected excerpts by Mike Dubrasich
Stephen J. Pyne is more than the World’s Foremost Authority on Fire; he is our premier philosopher of fire and fire’s poet laureate. Author of more than 20 books about fire and the history of fire, Pyne is easily most prolific student of external combustion, and the most eloquent.
In his recent essay about fire in Missouri, Pyne touches on old themes but in a new landscape (for him). And in that new landscape he again demonstrates the essential nature of fire on Planet Earth: free-burning fire is inextricably bound up with humanity. This ancient fire planet has been home to a fire creature, Homo sapiens, for many tens of thousands of years, and that fire creature has usurped control. People are the Masters of Fire, and Masters of this Earth because of it. The arrangement is Faustian, though. The item cannot be returned to store. Fire is our tiger by the tail, and we can’t let go.
Missouri provides an ideal setting and history for another (delightful to the discerning reader) Pyne exposition on fire and culture and the landscapes they share. Missouri, in particular the Ozark Mountains, has an ancient history of human occupation and use. People have shaped the vegetation there through anthropogenic fire. Lightning fires are rare; human-set fires common.
But the rough and dissected terrain of the Ozarks has also played an important role, because that roughness precludes the propagation of fire across vast tracts (unlike the smooth and unbroken landscapes of the Great Plains or the Great Basin, for instance). The commingling of a landscape resistant to fire spread and waves of torch-bearing residents has led to a fire mosaic, a patchiness of burning and patchiness of the impacted vegetation.
The Ozarks are fragmented by human-set fire and fire refugia. The resulting mosaic is, perhaps, a model for fire propagation and control elsewhere. Such is Pyne’s lesson in Missouri Compromise, on the surface, but as always his teachings burn deeper than that.
He begins by reminding us that the accepted notions of fire and fire suppression lack depth. Our prevailing philosophies of fire are cursory and over-simplified, as is so much of our fast-paced, attention-deficient culture today:
… So it is that America’s fire polity has split into two dominant confederations. One looks to wilderness as a guide, and tolerates human activities insofar as they lead ultimately to their own removal. The other looks to working landscapes for which fire remains an implement for hunting, herding, logging, and other forms of sustenance that serve human economies. There is little common ground between them: a land must ultimately subscribe to one or the other. The lines between, often with legal and political sanction, are rigidly drawn. This time the national polarities do not align North and South but east and west. The wilderness ideal remains firmly anchored in the public domain of the West; the working landscape, in private ownership for the most part, or on the public lands providing recreational services, in the East.
